One for the Road by Tony Horwitz Read Free Book Online

“G’day,” “Howdy partner,” or “Draw!”
    It seems that silence is the appropriate response; sheep herding, like sheep delivering, breeds a certain reserve. Tony tips his Akubra hat at Paul. Paul nods. Clint, who appears to be about twelve, stands slightlybehind his father, kicking gravel and staring at his feet. He looks as if he began mustering stock in the stroller and has done little else since.
    The three go about their business so quietly that I begin wondering if there’s something illicit about the whole operation. Then Tony breaks the silence with a flat-toned one-liner.
    “The girls are gonna love these big stud rams.” His wink is so big it lifts one whole side of his face. “And if they don’t, we’ll just have to give ’em a kick in the you-know-where.” Then he and Clint load their bleating cargo inside a truck and disappear into the bush. I suspect Clint won’t see another stranger before the next load of rams.
    My own horizons are about to broaden. Ever since Dubbo, the automobile has been a cocoon against the bleak and arid landscape beyond the windscreen. And north of Charleville, the road becomes so narrow that vehicles drop two wheels onto the dirt shoulder to avoid sideswiping each other as they pass. The travel is as unsettling as it is dull.
    But after Augathella the road plunges into a sweeping grassland that resembles the “big sky” country of the American West. Clouds drift lazily toward a distant horizon, broken only by the occasional flat-topped mesa, or “jump-up,” as they’re called in Queensland. It is the sort of setting that looks naked without a Sioux Indian or two galloping into the middle distance.
    I feel my eye and spirit drawn outward across the open plain. Even Paul is stirred to comment. “Plenty of room to move out here,” he says, stretching his legs. Then silence for another hour.
    The writer Paul Theroux once observed that conversing with strangers is a peculiarly American compulsion. “To get an American talking it is only necessary to be within shouting distance and wearing a smile,” he writes. “Your slightest encouragement is enough to provoke a nonstop rehearsal of the most intimate details of your fellow traveler’s life.”
    He’s right, of course. Whenever I replay my first hitchhiking trip across America, ten years ago, it comes out like a blurry home movie—Rocky Mountains, Grand Canyon, the wet green Oregon woods—with a voice-over of one Middle American after another reciting his life story. That was one of the things I liked so much about hitching: getting a personalized tour of the continent with people I’d never otherwise meet.
    So far on this trip I’ve been lucky to extract a complete sentence from a driver, much less a life story. As a reporter in Sydney, Australians have sometimes struck me as shy, at least by American standards. But I assumed it was a city-bred reticence, or maybe some remnant of English reserve. Now, after riding with so many silent country folk, I’m beginning to suspect that it’s the bush that is the true home of the taciturn Australian.
    Near Tambo, Paul touches my arm and points at an astonishing tree that has a short and grotesquely stout trunk, rising to a bushy head. It looks like a bowling pin with an Afro haircut.
    “Bottle trees,” he says. “Fattest trees in the world.”
    I dig into my rucksack’s library for a paperback guide to Australian fauna and flora. Bottle tree.
Brachychiton rupestris
. Also known as Australian baobab, or boab. Native to South Africa, Australia, and nowhere else. Girth of up to fifty-nine feet. Sumo wrestlers of the Southern Hemisphere.
    Paul turns between two really obese specimens—some kind of signpost, apparently—and enters a sheep station the size of a medieval principality. It is six miles before we reach the manor, a split-level palace with tennis courts and swimming pools girdled round. The lord and lady are in Europe, Paul explains, while the prince